Structural Ambiguity Analysis on Headline of The Jakarta Post

Post The thesis is done due to a consideration that the user of language is supposed to know how their speech can be received and understood by audience than the listener without any missing message. Therefore, this thesis attempts to analyze Structural Ambiguity which is found in Headline of The Jakarta Post. The Jakarta Post is a daily newspaper which largest English language newspaper in Indonesia and it has been known well by the common people. There are some section offered by this news such as headlines, business, national, opinion, clads, your letters, and so on. This research chooses Headline section as the object of this analysis because this research can find the examples of structural ambiguity. The aims of this study are (1) to analyze the kinds of phrases that can be structurally ambigous in Headline of The Jakarta Post, (2) to describe the meaning of structural ambiguity in Headline of The Jakarta Post focused on governmental issues on January 2017. The type of this research is descriptive qualitative research. The data source of this research is ambiguous phrases found in Headline of The Jakarta Post. The data collection technique is accessed online (http://www.thejakartapost.com/paper/todays-paper/page/01/03/2017). The writer uses the theories from Hurford and Heasley’s and Stephen Ullmann’s and tree diagram by using Victoria Fromkin’s theory. The result of this study shows that (1) the writer found two types of structural ambiguity namely: noun phrase and verb phrase. There are 6 noun phrases and 10 verb phrases are shaped. (2) the meaning of structural ambiguity in Headline of The Jakarta Post are different based on the context of phrase. There are some ways to know the meaning exactly in phrases of headlines and resolve the structural ambiguity. The phrase can be interprets in two different forms which make the phrase modifies itself or modifies the whole of phrase.
Keywords: Structural Ambiguity, Headline news, Jakarta